Wolverhampton Linux User Group

Named from the words: DEBorah-IAN - Deborah being the wife of the original founder (Ian).

All Debian versions are named after Toy Story characters, with the last stable release, version 3.1, being "Sarge" which was released in June 2005.

Debian is a community based project and tends to have a strict requirement for free software (free as in speech and beer?). This wide community involvement makes it almost unique in the Linux world in that there is no single controlling company (compared to RedHat, Mandrake, Slackware, SuSE/Novell etc). Partly because of this, release cycles tend to be quite slow (which suits some users anyway) and aren't orientated towards commercial pressures.

Debian is perhaps the most widely used Linux distribution, thanks mainly due to the easy installation of new packages and handling of dependancies by the [apt] packaging tool, which until relatively recently has been unique and it's major "selling" point.

Debian also has a huge selection of packages available, saving it's users from having to compile packages by hand, making installation, setup and maintenance simple.

It is ideally suited towards stable server configurations, because of it's long stable release cycles and solid, well tested reliability. One of it's strengths is that it is available for more architectures than any other distribution.

Debian tends to have a very long release cycle, with a stable release typically being supported for approximately 2-3 years. As a rule the WolvesLUG is effectively a Debian fortress, albeit running some version of unstable/testing which is more frequently updated and therefore more recent/cutting edge etc.

There's loads of information at http://www.debian.org/